PALAEOASSOCIA as a methodological tool for phytosociological analyses is further developed

Otto Brinkkemper, Mans Schepers*, Onno van Tongeren

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
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Abstract

The earlier version of PALAEOASSOCIA involved a considerable input of manual labour in sorting species tables with association data to identify plant communities that could have been present. A large archaeobotanical dataset from the site of Best (The Netherlands) was used to judge whether this manual sorting results in subjective results. As these were found, we developed a fully automatic version of PALAEOASSOCIA, including this sorting process. Likelihood clustering with prior probability yielded the highest number of associations recovered from four samples, and was therefore chosen as the optimal clustering method. The sorted tables are automatically converted to syntaxonomical groups. The hierarchical level of these groups can be pre-defined by the user of the program. Syntaxa that are highly improbable geographically cannot be ruled out a priori, but need to be removed manually. PALAEOASSOCIA is not meant to replace other methods of ecological interpretations of archaeobotanical data, but instead as a tool to obtain a more detailed result.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)15-23
Number of pages9
JournalVegetation History and Archaeobotany
Volume33
Issue number1
Early online date14-Jun-2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Keywords

  • phytosociology
  • methodology
  • syntaxonomical groups
  • likelihood clustering

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